Unlink/Hide Excess Fermatas? (Solved)

I want to hide the bottom fermata in the empty bass clef of the piano. How do I go about doing this? When I click on a fermata, it shows all three as being linked, but I don’t want them all to be linked. I understand this is to go “OK, well, the last note on each instrument would be held” but I actually only want the flute note to be held (the top stave).

Subject to correction by more experienced users, I think the current best solution is to go into engrave mode and drag the unwanted fermata off the printed page.

All three farmatas are linked, and I don’t know how to unlink them. So in engrave mode if I do that it drags all three of them off the page.

In Engrave mode, you should be able to select each fermata independently - but as Dorico treats them as a single entity in Write mode, if you select them in Write then switch to Engrave, all 3 will remain selected.

Dorico’s approach to fermatas is quite elegant in that it automatically ensures all players know about an implied change to the meter (a pause); however, if you specifically only want one, an alternative method is to create a custom playing technique that uses the fermata glyph. You can then input that just on the staves you want.

Thank you, this fixed my problem. That’s also good to know about the custom playing technique.

I know this an old post but it just now applies to what I’m trying to do. In many legitimate musical cases - hymns is a major one I’m encountering this problem with - you simply don’t need to have both players (women’s and men’s voices) to have a fermata. One fermata over the top staff is perfectly sufficient. For those of us that have to engrave music exactly as it is written, this is a major problem. Likewise in piano music, you really don’t need a fermata in both hands if there is no music in one of the hands. (I don’t really care what it says in Behind Bars). When will the developers of Dorico accept the fact that we may need the ability to hide elements even if it isn’t standard notation and quit telling us how to notate our music? I realize there are other items that should have higher priorities - like proper xml export and a split rh/lh function for piano music that’s already inputted - but given the number of posts on the subject, you need a hide function sooner than later. I hate spending 30 minutes or more trying to figure out how to hide a fermata only to learn it can’t be done without crazy, stupid work arounds. I’m over exaggerating the problem, I know, but I get very frustrated when something that should be easy to do is almost impossible to and takes too long to figure out it can’t be done.

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Hi James, I’m sorry that this (and a number of other things, it seems) frustrates you. I can’t really add anything on this topic specifically beyond what I wrote earlier in this thread, describing the way Dorico handles fermatas natively, and offering a fairly simple alternative if you don’t like it (create a custom playing technique, and save it as default). Although I don’t think the “number shown” property and equivalent Engraving Option have come up in this thread:

Members of the Dorico team are all musicians, with first-hand experience of creating and notating music alongside their years of notation software development experience. They’re (we’re) very responsive to our users, I think it’s fair to say so you can trust if it’s come up somewhere on the forum, it will be on the team’s radar, and there’s a good chance it will get addressed in the not-too-distant future (*size/workload of the change dependent).

And when you find yourself struggling to find an answer, do just ask – not only are you likely to get a helpful answer pretty quickly from one of the friendlier forums the internet has to offer, but your use-case might well inform future features or changes.

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